If your grep doesn't support recursive search, you can combine find with xargs:

find / -type f | xargs grep 'text-to-find-here'

I find this easier to remember than the format for find -exec.

This will output the filename and the content of the matched line, e.g.

/home/rob/file:text-to-find-here

Optional flags you may want to add to grep:

-i - case insensitive search

-l - only output the filename where the match was found

-h - only output the line which matched (not the filename)

43

2018-06-20 08:49

List of file names containing a given text

First of all, I believe you have used -H instead of -l. Also you can try adding the text inside quotes followed by {} \.

find / -type f -exec grep -l "text-to-find-here" {} \;

Example

Let's say you are searching for files containing specific text "Apache License" inside your directory. It will display results somewhat similar to below (output will be different based on your directory content).

You can also use globbing syntax to search within specific files such as:

grep "class foo" **/*.c

Note: By using globbing option (**), it scans all the files recursively with specific extension or pattern. To enable this syntax, run: shopt -s globstar. You may also use **/*.* for all files (excluding hidden and without extension) or any other pattern.

If you've the error that your argument is too long, consider narrowing down your search, or use find syntax instead such as:

It's much quicker than any other tool like GNU/BSDgrep, ucg, ag, sift, ack, pt or similar, since it is built on top of Rust's regex engine which uses finite automata, SIMD and aggressive literal optimizations to make searching very fast.

It supports ignore patterns specified in .gitignore files, so a single file path can be matched against multiple glob patterns simultaneously.